[Nexus 7 (2013) Q&A] CornellEngineer:
Can't think of a good one

Once the slow boat from China finally arrives and I get the replacement mobo installed assuming it works I will have to see which Android OS is on it and decide if I wanna update it. I'm a firm believer in the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" philosophy so that's why all our Nexus devices stayed on KitKat...I read about a lot of folks having trouble after they went to Marshmallow or Lollipop with regards to flaky performance or battery life. Do you have any personal recommendations as to which one is the "best" for a Nexus 7?

After my partner's LTE model went kaput last week she went back to her Nexus 7 Wifi model. Performance was horrible...really bad lagging and constant freezes. Since she uses her tablets mostly for reading books that she buys from Google Play I disabled many of the built-in apps and uninstalled a few games and apps I had put on it...that didn't help. Then I cleared the cache using the fastboot menu...that didn't help either. I updated the OS from 4.4.2 to 4.4.3 over the internet and that didn't help. I then updated to 4.4.4 and that didn't work. Finally in desperation before buying a new tablet I did a factory reset (not a hard reset) and that worked real good...it is now back to its former zippy self and doesn't freeze up any more. Hopefully it stays that way because when she's happy then that makes my life is a little easier...LOL. She really loves the Nexus 7 design so the longer I can keep them going the better.

One bad habit she has is leaving her tablet on for days at a time. I kept telling her that when she closes the case that just shuts off the screen but the tablet is only in hibernation and still drawing power. Not only does that put needless cycles on the battery but I suspect it may also have something to do with causing lag over time and/or accelerating premature failure of the flash chip but that's just an unsubstantiated hunch on my part. Hopefully now that she's had a unit fail on her maybe she'll finally listen to me and power the tablet completely off when she goes to sleep or doesn't plan on using it for a day or two.

I'll look into that RESTOCK app you talked about...I became familiar with Nexus Root Kit recently while troubleshooting and it appeared to be a nice little tool but as you said it seemed a bit dated and some parts no longer worked. I have a lot more experience working on PCs than I do Android devices so any tools that make it easier to do routine maintenance or upgrades without bricking them is AOK in my book. Thanks for the suggestion and if you could let me know which Android OS you like the best on your Nexus 7s and why that would be much appreciated too. Like I said, she uses her tablets mostly as book readers so we don't need all the latest bells and whistles unless the newer versions do a better job at trimming the NAND or stuff like that. I understand there was a big improvement with the TRIM function starting with version 4.3 but I don't know if subsequent versions made further improvements or not. So as of right now I'm probably inclined to stick with 4.4.4 unless you have good reasons to go with a newer version.

Cheers back at ya,

Dale